Reviews for Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG

The average rating for Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-09 00:00:00 Emmanuel Chen Jack Cashill must surely be the finest peddler of plain-folk history in contemporary America. Like itinerant salesmen of generations past, in Popes and Bankers he meanders through the depths of Western cultural history seeking to sell a story of contemporary "moral cultural" decline; one that, he says, has brought the entire capitalist enterprise perilously close to insolvency. While his focus on the leading thinkers of the past two and a half millennia and their positions on usury is admirable, especially for an author whose best-selling work to date is a screed on how modern day intellectuals have perpetrated collective fraud against common sense*, the history he has for sale here is about as creditworthy as a Countrywide adjustable rate mortgage vintage 2004. Cashill starts from a single premise: religious values are indispensible in capitalist economies. Because rational decision making alone does not ensure moral outcomes, he finds it worthwhile to probe the sectarian nature of the agents responsible for lending, which is itself the basis for a modern capitalist economy. What results is a book oddly preoccupied with Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant financiers and the confessional nature of the contemporary American banking establishment. One interesting chapter, for instance, illuminates the role that the Knights Templar played in the formation of an early international savings and loan network for kings and princes seeking fame, adventure, treasure, and salvation in the twelfth and thirteenth century Levant. Not satisfied with simply expounding upon the financial innovations of the Christian warrior monks, Cashill also informs that the Crusaders themselves were simply trying "to right undeniable wrongs." What's more, he justifies, "if giving alms to the poor was thought to be an investment in one's heavenly reward, fighting a crusade was a leveraged buyout of the same." If such metaphysical absurdities weren't enough, readers can take heart that Cashill feels as comfortable with revisionism as did the two men who would crack the hegemony of the Catholic Church in sixteenth century Europe. Several hundred years after the collapse of medieval monastic finance, the corrupt papal establishment, in concert with the Medici's of Florence dominated the world of Western finance. John Calvin and Martin Luther both led popular revolts against that establishment but only the former encouraged more tolerant thinking on the subject of usury. For the Calvinists, lending at interest was simply a matter of equity, not something that need be determined by scripture. Their early embrace of this modern capitalist sensibility provides some context to the improbable seventeenth century Dutch tulip bubble. The Lutherans, by contrast, fare less well in Cashill's accounting. In fact, he traces a direct lineage between the early popes, who were able to transcend their anti-usury fanaticism, the Lutherans, who weren't, and the latter day followers of another "messianic German," Karl Marx. Marx, whose father converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, comes in for particular scorn from Cashill when he notes that Das Kapital "reads like the stage direction for Shylock in a Third Reich production of The Merchant of Venice." In a subsequent chapter Cashill sets out to debunk the myth that 1980s was a decade of greed led by the titans of Wall Street. The story of junk bonds, ostentatious wealth, and insider trading was, he says, largely a function of a Wall Street that was "no longer Jewish enough." Though Ivan Boesky, Dennis Levine, and Michael Milken, just three of the most prominent of those who would serve prison time for their role in the decade's financial scandals, were all of Jewish heritage, none came from the pedigreed families who had produced the likes of the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, or the Lehmans. Cashill implies that because their fathers owned topless bars, traded in scrap metal, and raised their families in the San Fernando Valley, that there is something suspect about their religio-ethnic ties. That it would be Rudy Giuliani, a Catholic Italian from Brooklyn with a Jesuitical worldview, which would bring the young Turks to justice seems to Cashill to be an instance of divine justice itself. As for Bernie Madoff whose fraud started that same decade, "he was arguably less greedy in the 1980s than he was in the 1990s." According to Cashill, Madoff was just Jewish enough to effectively use "tribal loyalties" to swindle other well-to-do Jewish investors. He notes, shockingly, of the fallout from Madoff's fraud that "one does not have to be an anti-Semite to enjoy it." Popes and Bankers is littered with exactly such gratuitous demagoguery, both sectarian and political. From the enlightenment to the environment, Cashill's partisan political asides leave nothing possibly associated with the leftist elite untouched. He rails against academic attempts to read homosexual intent into "just about every character in world literature." He assails the prodigal Thomas Jefferson and extols the virtuous Andrew Jackson, claiming that he was tough on corruption and a champion of small government. (On Jackson, we also learn that "God cannot possibly allow the dead to spy on their living descendents, because if, by some miracle, Jackson got to heaven, watching the TARP rollout in 2008 would have been pure hell.") With respect to immigrants, Cashill pulls no punches. He finds it incredulous to think that some illegal immigrants might have had the chance to purchase homes, while "many of the legal immigrants were unable to read the [loan] documents." His contempt for single women is particularly striking, especially for those that might have children, be divorced, or be of a racial or ethnic minority. Why such women might ever contemplate home ownership is beyond the logical imagination of Cashill. Provided that you are aware of his incendiary political stripes from the outset, reading past such irrational chutzpah may be possible, but getting to the bottom of Cashill's muddled arguments is a much more elusive task. It's clear that he sees the erosion of religious values as being responsible for the breakdown of the family, the unit he believes most responsible for assuring economic welfare in our society. That is a moral argument that has been and will continue to be debated among liberals and conservatives, the religious and the secular in American society. What are less clear are the cultural arguments he holds responsible; namely, a "widespread embrace" of credit, the media's willingness to portray irresponsible individuals as victims, a civil rights movement whose advocacy distorts markets, and finally the failure of the legal establishment to execute and enforce proper contracts with respect to mortgage issuances. On each count, his evidence is thin, polemical, and very often cuts against the larger narrative threads of his book. His predisposition is to condemn corrupt governance and prodigal consumers while painting Wall Street as a victim, but he never convincingly escapes the orbit of corporate culpability. As any canny salesman understands, redemption is among the most intoxicating of sales pitches. Fittingly the last chapter of Popes and Bankers, aptly titled "Restoration", is set aside for a modern day evangelist. Dave Ramsey is a former real estate speculator with a down home southern drawl who made and then lost millions. Now this once fallen evangelist is selling a "Total Money Makeover" to an audience who also has endured its own crisis. With a healthy dose of nostalgia ("my great-grandparents thought debt was sin") and the same quintessentially American optimism that de Tocqueville wrote of 180 years earlier, Ramsey preaches a gospel of debt management to the denim-clad masses. Cashill cleverly understands that such rehabilitation might be equally applied metaphorically to the entire capitalist enterprise that he says has been so threatened by moral cultural decline. His message that redemption is possible, while uplifting, serves to obscure the numerous short comings of the analytical arguments made in this book. His polemicized populist history of credit and debt may appeal to some plain-folk partisans, but should in no way be confused with a serious treatment of a worthy cultural subject of study. © Jeffrey L. Otto April 17, 2011 * Hoodwinked: How intellectual hucksters have hijacked American culture. Cashill, Jack. 2005.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-27 00:00:00 Jonathan Southard As a cultural history of credit and debt, Cashill's book is impressive in scope, but suffers from the brevity with which he treats his historical subjects as he blasts through history in short chapters. There's no real critical engagement with quoted authors; instead Cashill colors the surface of his historical narrative with his own ideological brush, in a light, meandering prose. His failure to really engage the material he presents in any meaningful way is disappointing. The overarching narrative he constructs tends to be dominated by his interest in the roll Jews played in the history of credit and debt - how they've succeeded, been persecuted, yet still dominate finance. It seems a very personal book with a somewhat narrow focus on history. Although Cashill does find a few interesting historical tidbits to sprinkle throughout his otherwise bland book.